Chapter One Hundred and Forty One
Standing on the Right Platform – Part III: Officers and Gentlemen
From “Thundering Voices – Congress & Reconstruction” edited by William Clancy
Buffalo 2000
“
This blood stains us all. I fear how these deaths may mark the soul of the nation…” President Lincoln to Secretary Seward as they stood vigil the night before the execution of Jefferson Davis…
“
The execution of Robert Toombs has excited the nation’s appetite for the execution of great men. They will not be satisfied until there has been a balance of blood entered in the ledger against that of their lost fathers, husbands and sons…” George Washington Julian
From "The Fallen Idols" by Teddy Braddock
Grosvenor 2003
“The officers of the rebellion fall into five categories: (i) those found guilty of treason who were executed; (ii) those found guilty of treason but who could not be executed under the Chantilly terms; (iii) those found guilty of other capital crimes and executed; (iv) those found guilty of other capital crimes but who could not be executed under the Chantilly terms; and (v) those who were simply proscribed to be banished from the borders of the United States for the remainder of their days…”
From “A Day That Will Live in Infamy - the Hunter Controversy” by Prof. J. K. Lang
LSU 2003
“He died puzzled to the last. Gustavus Woodson Smith had given no orders to have David Hunter executed. He had promulgated no directions that David Hunter should be executed. He simply had the misfortune to be Robert Barnwell Rhett’s corps commander before, during and briefly after the battle of the Blackwater. Though having taken no pains to ensure General Hunter’s safety perhaps he was not as blameless as he himself believed…
He was sentenced to hang by the Boston Military Tribunal. The President of the Court, William Rosecrans delivering the sentence…”
From "The Great Constitutional Crisis" by Dr. Lee M. King
Carlotta 1962
“Never in the history of North America has the sentence of death been so capriciously dealt out. Inconsistencies abounded. Luck and influence played their parts…
Secessionist legislators were marked for death as “
treasonous office-holders who had broken their…oaths of office”. Men like William Barksdale (U.S. Congress) and William Wirt Adams (State Legislature) of Mississippi, Alfred Holt Colquitt (Georgia Legislature), Matthew Ransom (North Carolina Legislature), John George Walker (South Carolina Legislature) and most infamously Richard Taylor (Louisiana Legislature) paid the ultimate price for promoting or supporting the secession of their states while in elected office…”
Gallows within the grounds of Fort Warren, Boston
From "The Fallen Idols" by Teddy Braddock
Grosvenor 2003
“Aside from those “
treasonous office-holders who had broken their sacred oaths of office to the United States” a great many former army officers captured outside the scope of the Chantilly terms would face charges of treason…
Of them P.G.T. Beauregard was perhaps the most famous. His correspondence with pro-secessionist politicians in the south and his attempts to secure high rank in the army of any secessionist state, all whilst in charge of the military academy at West Point, guaranteed his conviction. He would not stand alone. The Boston and Columbus Tribunals would similarly convict the likes of Samuel Cooper, George B. Crittenden, James Deshler, Arnold Elzey, Franklin Gardner, Dabney H. Maury, and Beverley H. Robertson for treason while still commissioned officers in the United States Army. The likes of Deshler and Gardner had never even formally resigned despite waging war against their former comrades. Elzey had handed over the arsenal to which he was posted to rebel troops. Others were sentenced in absentia, those “lucky” few who had already escaped beyond the reached of the U.S. government like Henry Hopkins Sibley…
The military tribunals were particularly hard on those Northern born sons who had “gone South” in or out of uniform: Julius Adolph de Lagnel, Josiah Gorgas, Walter Husted Stevens and John C. Pemberton were all convicted of treason and sentenced to hang…
Revisionist historians, particularly in the 1960s and early 1970s were quick to accuse the tribunals of injustice. They are often characterized as tools of the Radicals to indulge their blood lust. Nothing could be further from the truth as was evidenced by the many acquittals. William McComb of Pennsylvania, the man who guided Lee to Pipe Creek, was found not guilty of treason. Other notable rebels who were tried and cleared included Thomas Hindman and Albert Pike…
Often in these cases the prosecution cited as the example of an exemplary United States officer of rebel sentiment, Edmund Kirby Smith. Though Smith was wholly in sympathy with the rebels and would resign from the army upon the secession of Florida, “
he executed his duties up to that point as though he were the most steadfast New England abolitionist in uniform”. When called upon by Ben McCulloch to surrender Fort Colorado in Texas to the state militia he refused and expressed his readiness to fight to defend it. “
Loyal in word, in thought and deed until the day of his resignation”. Such was the test applied to the conduct of former U.S. army officers…
The Chantilly terms were no hollow document. Kearny’s word would save many leading rebels from the gallows. Richard H. Anderson, taken at Charlotte, had resigned his U.S. commission only after having secured a satisfactory Confederate one. Thomas L. Clingman, captured after Atlanta, had conspired to secure the secession of his state from his office in Congress. The Cobb brothers, Howell and Thomas, Alexander R. Lawton, Mansfield Lovell, Gideon J. Pillow, Gabriel Rains, J.E.B. Stuart were all men who otherwise would have faced the gallows for their treason whether in office or in uniform but for the Chantilly terms. Instead they faced life terms of imprisonment. Perhaps the most renowned figure to fall into this category was William Hardee. Hardee had, while still a commissioned United States officer, purchased and supplied arms to the various early secessionist state and Confederate forces weeks before his resignation…”
From “An Uncivil War” by Dr Guy Burchett
LSU
“The military tribunal operating in Lawrence, Kansas had few of the trapping of due process and justice that those in Columbus and Boston sought to convey. The nervousness of the eastern tribunals about the legality of military tribunals manifested itself in a scrupulous fairness beyond that which could have been expected in a civil court after the civil war. The Lawrence Tribunal had no such qualms. As a sop to the western radicals this small tribunal was handed the Missouri guerillas for trial. Justice, such as it was, was swift and arbitrary. Only here were the convicted rebels hung one at a time over a period of several weeks. William Quantrill, William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, and Silas M. Gordon would all swing in Lawrence. Champ Ferguson would have faced the same inevitable fate but he was shot while attempting to escape custody while being conveyed to trial in Lawrence by the provost marshal for western Missouri, Major James Butler Hickok…
The execution of prisoners of war, both black and white, would controversially result in the execution of several senior rebel officers as well as the “raiders” of whom such behavior had come to be expected…”
The civilian trial of Collett Leventhorpe in Norfolk, Virginia
From "The Fallen Idols" by Teddy Braddock
Grosvenor 2003
“Whether at their direct order or simply because the actions had been carried out by officers and men under their command, the documented execution of Union prisoners of war would prove to be one of the emotive grounds for the trial of a rebel officer. Those convicted ranged from the obvious suspects like the raiders John Hunt Morgan and Basil Wilson Duke, through those that regularly ordered the death of African-American prisoners like Samuel Wragg Ferguson and Jacob Hunter Sharp, to the general officers commanding the armies under which “massacres” of prisoners, mainly African-Americans, took place like Joseph E. Johnson (Baton Rouge) and Braxton Bragg (Chickamauga)…
The treatment of prisoners of war remains one of the more horrifying aspects of the war. John H. Winder who was responsible for the administration of the Confederate system of prison camps died while awaiting trial…
If ever a man can have been said to have been hung for incompetence it was Lucius Bellinger Northup. Tried and convicted of starving prisoners of war, the man was guilty of little more than pursing and keeping an office well beyond his abilities as an administrator…
Others, either because of their subsequent conduct or because of the Chantilly terms, would be spared the hangman’s rope. Major Henry B. Holliday was one significant figure who faced imprisonment instead...
Simon Bolivar Buckner had his sentence of death for ordering the execution of Unionist guerillas in East Tennessee commuted to imprisonment for no better reason that the impassioned request of Major-General Ulysses Grant, which was endorsed by the President…
The Federal Government had not forgotten plight of Unionist communities within the so-called Confederacy when handing down justice. Terrible atrocities had taken place in Eastern Tennessee, Southern Mississippi, and in Texas. Those responsible like Generals Albert Gallatin Blanchard and Hamilton P. Bee, Colonels James Keith and James Bourland, Major John Gee, Captains James Duff, Colin McRae and James Young would all face death sentences. Many more would only be saved by flight south of the Rio Grande. Indeed even beyond Southern Unionists there was a move to seek justice for the southern civilians who had supported the rebellion but suffered for it anyway. Collett Leventhorpe would be handed over to the civilian courts in Virginia to be tried in Norfolk for the “Richmond Massacre”. To the shock of the whole nation so ultimately would Jefferson Davis…”
The only known image of the execution of Braxton Bragg
From “Viva Magruder! – The Early Days of the Anglo Community in Mexico” by D. Foster Wilkins
University of Vancouver 1985
“The story of the sons and daughters of the South who went into exile is an epic tale as broad in scope as it is deep in emotion. No one volume could ever hope to capture their story. The great waves of immigration seemed endless beginning with the rebels who fled Texas to avoid the Federal advance, followed next by the seemingly endless list of those proscribed and their families…
Colonel Patrick Cleburne commander of the Imperial Cavalry of the American Legion
Theirs was not one story but many…rich men who remained, if not rich, then at least wealthy like Wade Hampton...rich men who went into exile poor with nothing but a few dollars in their coat pocket like Zebulon York and Leroy A. Stafford...men who had lost everything with the confiscation of their plantations and properties...soldiers who could never shake their love of battle like John B. Magruder, William MacRae and William Raine Peck...men who wished to live in peace but who could never afford to like Patrick Cleburne and Reuben Lindsay Walker...men who would never accept their defeat and planned for the south to rise again like Louis T. Wigfall, Walter Payne Lane and Edward Asbury O’Neal...and men who in defeat would see a new peaceful future in their exodus like Thomas Jackson…”
